Rules of Thumb – The best way to do anything in life

Ever wonder how many a people a cup of rice could feed? Your mother has told you one number, you’ve tried it on your own and come up with something else, but really there’s probably some kind of rule of thumb that you can use over and over again when making rice, right?

Or maybe there’s always a certain way you want to play a hand in Blackjack when you get two Kings? There are literally hundreds of rules of thumb that have been passed down from generation to generation without anyone really knowing where it came from or if it’s really true.

Luckily, there is a very cool site that is try to combine all of the rules of thumb stuck in people’s head into an freely accessible online database.

RulesOfThumb.org has a collection of thousands of rules of thumb collected into over 151 categories that you can easily browse. It’s pretty cool and very useful information if you’re someone starting out doing something new like cooking, shooting a gun, hiking or playing a new sport, etc.

I know it’s especially useful for me since I no idea about anything other than computers! One rule of thumb I would add would be "When you have a problem with your computer, restart it!". That solution has saved me many a time!

The definition of a rule of thumb according to the site is as follows:

A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark.

Here are some cool rules of thumb that I thought were quite interesting.

Count the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, and add 37. No, you didn’t just calculate your age in cricket years – you measured the temperature outdoors in degrees Fahrenheit.